There is nothing novel about change. The reality is that the only certainty is change. Some recent changes have created an atmosphere in which a worldwide war is the more likely to develop or, conversely, out of which the prospect for a better world order is being generated.

It is sometimes difficult to realize that a number of wars have actually taken place since World War II. Recently a magazine compiled a list of forty. Even then it excluded some border differences which might have been listed as wars. Not all of these were large-scale wars, but the number of serious conflicts remains impressive. These wars took place when it is generally accepted that an uneasy peace exists. Most of these, in a different era, could have precipitated a worldwide conflict. Why not since 1945?

I have a difficult assignment: to describe, analyze and evaluate the new student movement—and to do so from the vantage point of one who has one foot in the new generation and one foot in the old. The task is complicated by the nature of the movement itself, by its ideological and organizational looseness, by the fact that it is both mood and movement. And it must be said that most of what has been written about the “New Left” in the mass media and even in the better political journals has been dismally ignorant. Some of the writers on the Left have viewed the student movement with a mixture of awe and indulgence, while those on the Right assail it as the reincarnation of communism.

The primary ethical problem for United States policy in regard to “wars of national liberation” is that of intervention, not war. To be sure, the morality of war must be faced together with the morality of intervention. But the basic question for the intervention is not whether morally it may use force and take human life, but whether morally it may exercise power where it has no authority. By what right does the United States seek to influence the relationships, structures, and focus of authority of another political entity—or evert of a nonentity in process of becoming an entity?

Justifiable intervention is an admissible—although limited—concept except to those persons who reject every unilateral use of national power, and to those who take an absolutistic stand in favor of the principle of non-intervention (and that stand also requires an ethical defense).